Name-a-Day Calendar, December 12: Cal Poly Mustangs
Page 36 of 365
Chosen in: 1925
Chosen by: Student body vote
Welcome to California! I’m using each individual school’s preferred athletic branding, so the order of some schools here might be a tad confusing. I promise I’m not just skipping teams.
When I was a high school senior applying to colleges for undergrad, I didn’t want to waste money on a ton of application fees for no reason, so I only applied to two schools: the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I got into both and I liked both a lot, so I had a hard time picking just one. Nebraska ended up winning out, but even as I was actively enrolled and taking classes in Lincoln, I wasn’t really sure of myself, so I ended up transferring to Minnesota after just one semester and finishing out my bachelor’s degree in Minneapolis.
I say all that to say that I understand the indecision shown by what was then the California Polytechnic School following their 1925 student body vote to select a mascot. The two options, the names of their suggesters evidently lost to time, were “Mustangs” and “Mules”. “Mustangs” won the popular vote and has been the name of Cal Poly’s sports teams ever since, but the school apparently liked “Mules” too much to completely discard it, so they used it as the name of their junior varsity teams until they became a four-year school in 1941.
Like me 90 years later, Cal Poly was given what should have been a zero-sum choice between two equally enticing options1 and they chose both.
Read more on the history of their mustang mascot here.
Previous page: BYU Cougars
Next page: Cal State Fullerton Titans
Find every page at the Name-a-Day Calendar hub!
I don’t think I’d ever live in Lincoln again but it’s a great city and I always have a blast revisiting it.
I would simply eschew both to be the Cal Polywhirls